Professors moved left since 1990s, rest of country did not

Every few years a debate re-emerges on the internet as to whether university faculty have truly shifted to the left, and if so, whether it matters. The debate has just flared up because of a graph that I made after some discussions about ideology in the academy with my friend Jon Haidt, who wanted to document the trend here at Heterodox Academy. The graph (Figure 1) got picked up and debated at a number of websites, including The American Interest, The American Conservative, Mother Jones, and Bloomberg.

Conservatives are outraged at what they see as a sharp leftward movement in the academy [he then showed figure 1] But what’s really happening here? Did professors move left, or did the meaning of conservatism in America change in a way that drove scholars away?

Krugman notes that the identities of the two political parties were changing in the 1990s, and by some metrics the Republican party moved further to the right than the Democratic party did to the left. He concludes:

Overall, the evidence looks a lot more consistent with a story that has academics rejecting a conservative party that has moved sharply right than it does with a story in which academics have moved left.

I agree that the changing nature of the parties could have caused some academics to simply change their political self-descriptions without actually changing their views on substantive matters. And if that process explained all of the changes in Figure 1, then it would indeed absolve the academy: “Hey, it’s not we who changed, it’s the Republicans!”

But is the process Krugman refers to so powerful that it can explain the full trend, or even most of it? I don’t think so, and here’s why.

First let me explain how I made the graph. The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA has been conducting triennial surveys of undergraduate teaching faculty for the past 25 years. The HERI samples are huge — tens of thousands of professors — and this is a robust and well-executed survey. The data is comparable and responsibly collected over a long period of time. The survey includes a question asking respondents to describe themselves using a 5-point ideology scale that offers these options: “Far left,” “Liberal,” “Moderate,” “Conservative,” and “Far right.” I merged far left with liberal, and I merged far right with conservative, so that we can see the big picture most clearly. Figure 1 plots the percentage of respondents who fell into those three groups, in each of the 3-year data collection periods. The data is weighted to represent the national population of full-time faculty with teaching responsibilities for undergraduate students.

Figure 1 reveals a striking ideological change among faculty over time. While the data confirms that university and college faculty have long leaned left, a notable shift began in the middle of the 1990s as the Greatest Generation was leaving the stage and the last Baby Boomers were taking up teaching positions. Between 1995 and 2010, members of the academy went from leaning left to being almost entirely on the left. Moderates declined by nearly a quarter and conservatives decreased by nearly a third.

It certainly looks like a very large change that happened in just 15 years. Could it have happened for the reason that Krugman proposed? We can begin to answer that question by looking at broader national trends. We can compare trends in the academy to shifts in partisan and ideological definitions that were occurring to the electorate as a whole. To do that I examined the GSS dataset.

Figure 2 presents data from the General Social Survey. I plotted self-reported ideology over time for the population as a whole. The figured reveals remarkable stability from 1974 through 2014 with moderates making up a plurality of Americans. If we look at the 25 year period that the HERI data encompasses, the overall average shows that 38% of Americans are moderates, 35% are conservative, and 27% are liberal. There is little change over the 25 year period despite the changing definitions of ideology and partisan sorting that Krugman referred to.

Figure 2. The Ideological Positions of Americans. Source: GSS 7-Point ideology scale with three degrees of liberalism and conservatism each collapsed into one group.

If we compare figures 1 and 2, we see that the professoriate was changing while the electorate as a whole was not. Professors were more liberal than the country in 1990, but only by about 11 percentage points. By 2013, the gap had tripled; it is now more than 30 points. It seems reasonable to conclude that it is academics who shifted, as there is no equivalent movement among the masses whatsoever.

The people who shape the minds of America’s students have long leaned left, on average. But students who entered college before 1990 could count on the fact that their professors did not all vote the same way or hold the same views on the controversial issues of the day. Students who arrived after 2005 could make no such assumption. For example, Figure 3 is from Jon Haidt’s recent post plotting new data on the policy views of social psychologists, on nine culture war issues (such as abortion and gay marriage).

Figure 3: Views of 327 social psychologists, on nine culture war issues. For further details see here.

Only one social psychologist, out of a sample of 327, had views that were right of center. This graph is incompatible with Krugman’s hypothesis that professors didn’t change their views, they just changed their labels.

I’d like to end this post on a personal note. I joined the faculty of Sarah Lawrence College in 2010. When I told my friends from graduate school about my new job, they warned me to keep my head down and avoid discussing political topics with other faculty. This suggestion course, was hard to follow as I was explicitly hired to teach American politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a college which happens to be one of our nation’s most well-known progressive and politically active institutions. I will never forget my second day of teaching at the College where I was called a right-wing wingnut. That accusation was made without any hesitation when I pointed out that an empirical trend suggested a very different policy outcome than what was being discussed around a lunch table. I teach and have long-followed the Daniel Patrick Moynihan mantra of “Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.” It is important to follow this both intellectually and pedagogically and I continue to push this idea regularly in the face of dissent.

This is what happens when viewpoint diversity disappears and orthodoxy reigns. When faculty in the social sciences can no longer have open discussions among themselves about political issues because dissent from the progressive stance is treated as treason, then what kind of political extremism and intolerance will we breed among our students? The answer, unfortunately, became clear in the demands that students issued on campus after campus last Fall, and in the cruelty and aggression some of them showed to anyone they deemed to be an opponent.

Orthodoxy is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of a university. Increasing viewpoint diversity should be at the top of every college president’s priority list.

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In so far as there appears to be more stability among the gen. population than in academia in political views there are some concomitant phenomena that have been largely unexplored. To wit: Literacy rates have dropped significantly from 93% in 1900 to 64% today. The neurological health of Homo sapiens in the West has changed. Stress, poor nutrition, parental practices (deteriorating), and massive toxic pollution from lead to pesticides. The epigenetic, social and psychoneuralendrocrinological environments have radically shifted. Paradoxically, in our stupefying age, the information age has inundated academic realms. The recognition of what comprises our humanity is better known in the enclaves of thinking, whaereas in the gen. population thinking itself is under attack. I give you Donald Trump and his minions.

Do these figures distinguish between full-time employed professors and adjunct faculty? The giant change in the last 15 years or so has been the enormous proliferation of adjuncts relative to full-time faculty, to the point where adjuncts now teach some 70% of all student contact hours. I suspect that the political views of adjuncts may differ significantly from those of full-time professors, even as adjuncts feel ever less comfortable expressing any personal views in the classroom for fear of alienating either the students or the full-time faculty, on both of whom they are absolutely dependent for the possibility of reappointment from term to term.

Stanley Rothman’s research indicated that there had been a dramatic shift between 1972 and 1989, so the shift you’re describing is an extension of a previous trend.

These measure a cross-section of the whole faculty. I’ll submit what you’re really seeing is a cohort effect. People retire, they are replaced with sectaries, the sectaries keep dissenters off hiring committees, and the few dissenters who pass through the screens are denied tenure. David Horowitz talked to the sole Republican in the history department on one campus about a decade ago. The man was near retirement and told Horowitz that he (a senior faculty member) had last served on a hiring committee in 1985. I can point you to an example of an arts and sciences faculty which let go one year of a philosopher (who had the support of his students and 11 publications to his credit) and a biologist (who had 12 publications to her credit and was well-regarded by those who had worked with her) and retained a ‘feminist’ in the social sciences division with weak course enrollments and fewer publications (about seven, to be found in lower rung journals). No non-idiot could mistake how the provost and her camarilla were defining quality.

I’ve seen Robert David Johnson (“KC”) called a ‘Right Wing Nut Job” in fora like this. Prof. Johnson is a mainline Democrat whose career has been devoted to studying the course of Great Society legislation through Congress.

Short version: data from the GSS show that from 1970 to 2008, all major segments of the U.S. population moved from centrist to right of center – except “Intellectual Upper Class”, which moved far out to the left.

This movement, incidentally, started in the early 1970s, and was essentially straight-line throughout.

Liberals are left??? 🙂
As the first, left are not democrats or liberals. They are (from time to time) left wing of the right. Because they are fond of capitalism.
Second, democracy is only the way of making decisions … it is not economy or political system. As it is capitalism. Or socialism. This is the main point of political compass.

The left are socialists and communists. They read Marx. They want socialism. Solidary society. Wealth, social security and rights for all. Real democracy in which people really have infulence to the system.

The right is for capitalism. Conservatives, democrats, liberals, nationalists… From the far right to center…
Capitalism is an economy and political system in which America lives now.
It is the system in which the richest take almost all the money and political power for themselves.

Your last sentence describes a plutocracy, which was anticipated by our founders within the Constitution and separation of powers. That it has been manipulated and exploited for decades by the Left is precisely what the Tea Party strives to correct. The Democratic Party no longer accepts non-conformists.

In the previous article I shortly explained how liberal morality is the morality of large complex organizations, power morality, and I continue from that.

When, or better still, in what kind of situations liberal morality emerges and why?

When the first Islamic empire was forming, when the central bureaucracy / large complex organization was taking shape, the first Caliph lamented, “My tribesmen are willful, independent and unruly. When I try to order them, I have to negotiate with them a long time, give to them too much from my wealth, and still they have a tendency to do what they want!” To solve this problem the Caliph imported new subjects from far away foreign lands. All their ethnic, familial, religious and cultural ties were cut, and, as they were unfitting and unconnected in their new land, their fate, prosperity, success, status, etc. was totally dependent on the Caliph. If the Caliph would order his new subjects to crush his own people, they would do it without hesitation, without questions and eagerly.

In this interface between normal and universal conservative human morality and liberal artificial, stunted and machine-like bureaucracy morality we can see what happens; loyalty to own people is cut, local authorities are devalued or made unimportant, and own peoples sanctities and purities (rules, customs, holy things, culture, good self-image, etc.) are passively or actively, implicitly or explicitly defiled. Instead of gradually solving the problems with his tribesmen over several generations, evolving, and developing functioning arrangements, the Caliph is greedy, short termist and power hungry, he is blinded by his high status, he has already cut himself off mentally and socially from his own people, and he wants big empire things to happen within his lifetime, or to be more specific, almost immeadiately. Caliph owed everything he had and was to his own people, but he betrayed them. Caliph had before full human ties to his people, now he had more cold, calculating and technical ties to his new subjects and his tribesmen. When the new subjects start to form too much connections and ties, know more, decide and govern more, become more willful and demand more, the Caliph will throw them like a delicate flower under a horsewagon wheels, as much as he sees necessary, and acquires new cheap and atomized subjects from foreign lands. So a permanent revolution and subversion is formed inside and around the central bureaucracy. And why would the tribesmen always jump, run and swing according to the Caliphs whims? They have their own lives, and they have to take care of important social and business issues, they have their hands full as it is. They have obligations, loyalties and ties in their own communities.

Bureaucracy may be intelligent inside the bureaucracy, and there is always a lot of information processing going on, but governing bureaucracy is often stupid and inadequate in its relation to the outer society. To survive the huge information processing load, bureaucracy simplifies the richness and complexity of life, work and thinking in the outer world to simple categories; either-or; citizen – non citizen; income under 500, under 1000, more than 1000, more than 2000; etc. From the simplified categories statistics is created (statistics = state mathematics), which represents both bureaucrats seeing and thinking. World is divided into many more manageable, but factitiously separate fields, which in real world are heavily interconnected, and this is seen and understood only partially. Bureaucrats see the outer world in this simplified way. All important differences between people become problems (ethnicity, race, sex, culture, religion, local ties, family ties, etc.) which must be removed or made unimportant by propaganda, education, incentives, punishments, conformity, the influence and orders of authorities, etc. The same simplifying and conformist pressures work inside the bureaucracy too. A bureaucrat is a cog in the machine, and if he starts to function differently than the surrounding machine, transgressing the limits of his expected function, he is a problem, which is either beaten to a mold, removed or eliminated.

This is one of the reasons we dont have anymore geniuses in the bureaucracies, like professor Bruce Charlton says in his soon upcoming book ‘Genius Famine’. Geniuses are disruptive and catalysmic, mostly difficult personalities and often quite helpless in everyday matters. They often need special protection and support from others to thrive. They are often eliminated from the bureaucratic processess even before they can enter universities. They maybe poor, downtrodden and wretched at the fringes of society. Geniuses dont conform to the smooth and coherent operations of bureaucracies. This increases the stagnation and conformity of bureaucracies.

Another example of typical bureaucrat thinking is that when they have only one tool (one detached field of expertise), hammer, they see all problems through that tool, so every problem is nail. This was seen just recently, when it was noticed (by a psychologist?) that Trump has more disgust sensitivity than average person, which seems to be true, and blessed and protected be that disgust sensitivity. Then some psychologists commented that we would have no problems, if Trump would get or be forced into proper therapy. They were ignorant and/or indifferent of the huge and widespread societal problems and corruption, which cause the Trump phenomenom. These were just comments, but they represent the bureauratic attitudes, thinking and actions widely. Bureaucracies have one overriding and simplistic goal, to expand, to colonize every aspect of life, every little nook and cranny, break all the existing borders, and finally conquer and govern the whole world, rule it as a heavily interconnected bureaucracy network. Bureaucracies are in symbiosis with legislature, and helps it to produce laws. Bureaucracies implement laws. The State produces more and more laws, injunctions and regulations, they never try to reduce their total number. If people and companies would follow every law and regulation, the functions of society would mostly stop or pound contradictorily against each other. According to legal experts, laws and regulations are often shoddy, ignorant, incoherent, harmful and poorly thought out, and there are too many of them. People have to break laws and regulations constantly to function at least relatively well and to protect their interests and security. We have to already protect every day even our bodily and psychological functions, like disgust sensitivity, and the things connected to them from the encroachment of bureaucracies, whether it is done by mind distorting propaganda, “education”, surveillance, regulations, orders, punishments, incentives or force.

It is true that bureaucracy still can and does produce a lot of useful and good information and knowledge when we subtract all the politicized, biased, inferior, harmful and unimportant science away, so whats the problem?

***

To make the dilemma of bureaucratic colonization of life world more visible, lets paint a caricature. A Los Angeles researcher has studied extensively diets and their impact on health. He has developed the best diet in the world, Modern-Spartan-Mediterranian-Calorie Restricted-Healthy Fat-Diet, which, so the studies prove, increases life on average 8 years. Now he is implementing it with bureaucrats on worlds societies. He thinks, “Finally I, as an adviser of world government, can control also the diet of those stubborn and independent Finns’, those ignorant arctic rubes. Finland is the last place on earth where people still live as they like. I know much more about diets than any of them, so it is natural that the responsibility for their diets is given to me.” The new orders travel to provincial Finnish potentate, which then relays them to the approriate implementing and enforcing bureaucrats and storm troopers. As usual the bureaucrats misinterpret the given information, but miraculously this time it doesnt impact negatively the end results.

Wille and his family are chewing reluctantly their new food as the armed storm troopers watch behind their backs. The diet research was done with Mexican subjects, so it is adjusted to their tastes, stomachs and biochemistry. Finns have evolutionarily developed to eat, savor and digest only penguins, polar bears, reindeers and snow flakes. According to them the new diet tastes bad, leaves them hungry, and gives them stomach aches and diarrhea. Wille and his family cant work and study properly, because they are either sick or constanly dreaming of delicious chubby penguins. Family members become irritated, impatient, angry, and they start to quarrel and shout often. Wille was before the center of social gatherings, where he invited his friends. Wille is excellent cook and he always prepaped the most delicious penguincakes with reindeer toppings.

Because of Wille’s condition and lack of proper ingredients, his friendships start to wither and slowly die. After some time Wille divorces from his wife and is kicked out of work, because his working capability has declined. The same has happened in countless families. Millions of Finns send angry letters to the World Government headquarters in Los Angeles. Finns have computers, but they often freeze and sigh their currents off, so Finns have a tendency to send paper letters. Huge mountain of millions of complaint letters arrives to the diet researher. They have no capability to process the information in these letters, even if it was their only job, let alone now, when the whole worlds matters are their responsibility. They have countless similar paper or electronic information mountains.

And everybodys hands are tied all the time to the suddenly erupted 100 civil wars in the World State, in Muslim areas. Muslims announced that they started these wars because they love to fight, and they said they will surrender, lay down their arms and stop fighting immeadiately when the whole world submits to their rule.

But the researcher wants to show that he can handle everybodys businessess, all businessess, so he orders his assistant researchers to pick randomly small number of letters from the mountain, translate them and simplify their content to a few simple yes and no answers, and then analyze them statistically. The assistants do as they are told. They make many misinterpretations and mistakes when they translate the letters. While they read the selected letters, they say to each other, “Look at how those polar country bumpkins write. Full of wild emotions, caricatures, sarcasm, irony and such. Our Marxist-Leninist professor emphasized time and time again that we must always express ourselves in detached, abstract and matter of fact way, like politically aware vanguard people do, and look down upon childish and ignorant people like the Finns. We are evidence based people, they have only subjective anecdotes.” Then they analyzed the complaints statistically, and found out that the complaints cancelled each other out. Everybody were happy and congratulated each other over how masterfully and fast they solved the problems of, what was the country’s name, whatever. Some time later in dinner they had fully forgot the whole Finnish incident. Some time later in Finland Wille was lonely, wretched, poor and hungry, drinking booze and sleeping in staircases.

Later information seeped to the headquarters and whispered in loud voice to everybodys ears that the average lifetime of Finns didnt increase 8 years, it dropped 8 years. The diet researcher accused vehemently everybody down the line of command how they had misinterpreted and misimplemented his excellent diet. If they would have been more accurate in their implementation and used properly much more ideological food indoctrination, they would have got the results that was predicted. After some wrangling, they decided to increase propaganda and restrict the calories of the diets more, and then, as usual, forgot the whole thing. The next generation of Finns died on average 8 years earlier than the previous, mainly because many committed suicide or starved. This time the bureaucracy didnt change anything, didnt react, because it had stagnated to mill out essentially the same old, the same old, the same old … results.

The next generation of Finns rose to revolution, and started a new Winter War. As the barbarian armies of Finns rolled near World State headquarters, the old atheist researcher hid full of fear under the desk, and prayed the God he had suddenly found, “Oh God, why do they hate me so! I have always meant good to everybody, I have always done nothing but good to everybody. Science says so, I can prove it, see.”

***

When the civilizations decays and nears its death, one of the signs is that the percantage of women rises in the bureaucratic middle and low, although all or most of the top positions stays at male hands. This can be seen also in such masculine cultures as Islamic empires. Bureaucracies wants of course to utilize women more as a relatively unused human resource, but they use women also because women feel more psychological pain than men when they act contrary to rules, social norms and expectations, ideology, authorities, etc., i.e. they are more conformist and more submissive to authority. Women are nice, fastidious, conscientious, they dont question so much, they dont disturb or break down functions of bureaucracy so much, etc. Womens intelligence distribution is narrower than mens, womens IQ are more packed in the middle, men have more less intelligent and more intelligent among them. Men have on average higher IQ. Men are more aggressive, dominant, competitive, determined, etc. Men see bureaucracy more as a tool, women see it more as a given reality. Women are often well represented among the most fanatical status quo supporters regardless of the system or society. Thus women do their bureaucratic jobs well, but they mostly cant challenge with their IQ or psychology the top leader men or top intelligent men, or develop too radically changing ideas. They are, at least from these points of views, ideal middle bureaucrats.

Whatever is the ideology of the bureaucracy in the beginning, it has natural tendency to be leftist in its thinking and to move leftward over time. As women are security and care oriented, and see the state as the ultimate and always loyal provider, increasing percentage of women in bureaucracy strenghtens the leftward current. Thus with increasing women the bureaucracy becomes often more soft totalitarian and stagnant, and it starts to hamper the functions of society more and more.

Another problem is that today too large part of the populations in the Western world have been educated in universities. IQ distribution is such that large part of weaker students cant study and perform properly in the universities. They end up producing poor quality, and often in one way or another, pernicious science, if at all. They have weak possibilities to get jobs, or jobs that are steady and which pay enough. Among them you often find the most radical leftist academics. Sociology is the worst field in this respect. I doubt it can be reformed. I would abolish it. As well as all the travesties of science, like womens studies, ethnic studies, queer studies, etc., where ever they may reside.

In the Western world the leftward drift of the universities was also influenced by the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global capitalism. Many Marxists, and leftist activists and officers, as they found themselves to be even more useless and anachronistic than before, had to reinvent themselves as diversity and rainbow officers, activists, educators, etc., and PC-guards. When the leftist leaders of universities took them in, even they didnt know what kind of they inviting.

There are other reasons for the leftward drift of universities.

Once the leftist conformity, forced silence and totalitarian features take over in bureaucracy, they are hard to get rid of. In the Soviet Union bureaucrats participated in processess, and said words and made decisions, which they knew will logically and inevitably lead to their own murder. Somewhat resembling situation is hinted by e.g. psychological Abilene trip -paradox where no-one in family wants to go to Abilene, but they think everybody else want to go there, so they all go and have a bad time. Also most of the group think -psychology applies to leftist conformity in universities.

So, when loyalty, authority and sanctity/purity is taken away from human morality, among other things the following are likely to happen:

a) Deletion or reduction of Loyalty; any own group, ethnic, religious, bureaucratic, national, native, etc. can and likely will be betrayed, abused, exploited, disparaged, etc. Reciprocity and general good will is reduced or absent. Threat detection and prevention will be reduced or missing. Removal of the necessary defenses of society. Weakening and disintegration of social groups. Passivity, idling and dependence on bureaucracies. Reduction of the responsibility for the self and others. Atomization, often virtual unsatisfying relationships. Etc.

b) Removal or reduction of authority and hierachy. Blindness to blind obeying of ostensibly non-authoritarian authoritarians. Harmful disrespect, devaluation and attack on authorities, among others, educators. Inability to learn properly, normal or high IQ idiots become more prevalent. Wild herd and crowd mentality replaces proper authority, totalitarian emotional and irrational tendencies of the herds. Breaking the code of conducts, breaking the proper rules, cultural degeneration. Dishonesty, propaganda and manipulation become normal replacements of authority. Etc.

There is only conservative morality, there is no liberal morality. Liberal morality is a distortion of normal human conservative morality. Liberal morality has been created by propaganda, liberal education, liberal habits, liberal conformity, liberal punishments, liberal incentives, liberal role models and authorities, liberal pleasures, etc. Liberals have conservative morality which has been atrophied by social influences and pressures. Some of them are inherently closest to the liberal morality in conservative moral spectrum. Liberals cant help but creating and using distorted and bad liberal versions of conservative moralities, or they secretly, self-deceptively or without understanding live by all conservative moral rules and principles.

I was, for more than a dozen years, a tenured professor of European history at a flagship state campus. (I left many years ago to join the high tech community in Silicon Valley, where I remain). (On my first day of teaching, one of my new colleagues reacted in absolute horror upon learning that I was a ….. Republican. She said, “How can that be? All academics, especially Jewish academics, are on the Left. And if you’re Jewish, socialism is in your heritage. All Jews respect socialism. How can it be that you’re not a socialist?!” Things hardly improved over the following decades….)

Looking back, a scholar, I noted two phenomena:

1) Narrowing of focus on what were considered topics really worth studying.

During my years a academia I noted (and published an article, “From Dialog to Monologue”) the changing discourse in my field from a rich embrace of multi-disciplinary approaches to cultural history to an increasingly monotonic focus on oppression, that is on race, class and gender, to the avoidance of almost all other topics. I’m sure other commentators have seen the same narrowing of discourse. And the focus on oppression studies was not a reaction to anything happening in the GOP. “Gosh, I don’t like the Tea Party which has taken over my party, so I guess I’ll study race/class/gender intersectionality.” Krugman’s suggestion is risible.

2) Social replication.

Why the narrowing of focus? In the Humanities and Social Sciences, at least, there is very significant social replication. Prospective grad students choose faculty with whom to study; faculty have a major role in selecting their grad students; graduate theses, not universally, but often carry on some part of the research tradition in which their own major professors are embedded. This is neither good nor bad, but it is how the university works. More race/class/gender studies will reproduce more and more grad students with the same focus. Again, this isn’t good or bad, it is social reality. Leftist professors will attract leftist grad students. While the effect may not be apparent in any given year, over two or three decades the shift to a political monoculture can be profound. The oft repeated accusation that straight white male professors will hire and promote people like them is just as apt an observation about the campus Left.

Regarding Prof. Krugman: While the Right has become a bit more extreme over time, the same is true of the Left. And university social replication assures that the Left will continue to dominate campus life. As Prof. Abrams data indicates, this has already happened, to the virtual exclusion of even moderate points of view. Professor Krugman’s absolute hatred of the Right is well documented and he appears to share the assumption that this is natural and normal because the Right is the stupid party and the Left the party of intellect–so of course the Left dominates discourse. The University, in his view, is no place for the Stupid Party. And when leftist social psychologists conduct pseudo experiments to prove that intelligence, tolerance of ambiguity, nuance are all positively correlated with strong Left commitments, he has his supposed fact base–thoroughly shot through with ideological biases–for his self-congratulatory smugness.

I think you misunderstand the left in this analysis. From the perspective of the academic left, you can’t use the opinions of the idiotic masses as any sort of reliable measure of the glorious wisdom of intellectuals. If Krugman says that the country has moved — not the intellectuals — then that’s simply the way it is. Your attempt to disprove his glorious genius by appeal to the hoi polloi is simply insulting.

I don’t see how that NYT guy can’t also wonder whether the Left has moved further Left?
Did microaggressions and trigger warnings exist in the 80s? I sure don’t remember anything that idiotic. Though I was only a wee nipper.

The idea that the Democratic Party has not moved left is not based in reality. For example, Bernie Sanders founded the far left Progressive Caucus in 1991 with five like minded members of Congress. Today the Progressive Caucus has around 80ish members. The centrist Democrat Blue Dog Coalition has been annihilated over the past 20 years, especially in the 2010 mid-term elections. From what I can tell it has about 14 members and virtually no influence. Bill Clinton loyalists created the centrist Democratic Leadership Council to groom centrist leaders for the Democratic Party. Rich Democrats no longer want to fund it. In its place is the Democracy Alliance, a group of progressive millionaires and billionaires interested in pushing the country left. So, there are few, if any, centrist Democrats remaining in Congress and no appetite from Democrat donors to fund centrist candidates to promote centrist policy positions.

Second, Pew released a big study about political polarization in 2014. Included is a fascinating GIF showing how the “median” Democrat and “median” Republican position has changed over the 20 year period from 1994-2014. During that twenty year period at no point did the “median” Democrat view move rightward. Only leftward. This is consistent with the rise of the Progressive Caucus and the Democracy Alliance pushing elected Democrats leftward and funding a progressive infrastructure to keep progressive issues front and center of policy debates. Contrary to what you hear in the media, the “median” Republican view actually moved left during Bill Clinton’s presidency AND during GWB’s first term. Then after the 2004 election, Republicans began swinging rightward again and did so through the remainder of GWB’s presidency. Then after President Obama was elected in 2008, the “median” Democrat position moved even more sharply leftward and Republicans moved sharply rightward. But overall, if the GIF is accurate, it is clear that Democrats moved further left over the 20 year period than Republicans moved right. Click the bar labeled “Animate data from 1994-2014” to start the GIF and watch for yourself.http://www.people-press.org/2014/06/12/section-1-growing-ideological-consistency/#interactive

Finally, a number of far left ’60s radicals who were part of the SDS and/or the Weather Underground were convicted of serious felonies (including murder) and went to jail. Some became academics after serving their time. I don’t know what conservative group would be equivalent to an SDS or Weather Underground. But whatever it is, I can’t imagine that if any of its members were convicted of serious felonies they would find a job in academia after serving their time.http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/10/how-1960s-radicals-ended-up-teaching-your-kids.html

I believe only two complementary & self-reinforcing ideologies belong in universities: free inquiry & meritocracy. Of course, those are my own ideologies, so maybe I too am biased… 😉

I was a product of a very special place where those ideals were held not only in the highest esteem, but were met by those who embodied the academic spirit to the highest degree. I was also aware enough to recognize an oasis of a dying tradition of intellectualism, scholarship, and innovation, that I had the luxury to flourish amongst.

One common lament you will hear from Nobel Prize winners is that they would not have been able to conduct their research in today’s prohibitive academic and funding environment. Moreover, students are not trained to become independent, freethinking scientists free to explore their own interests. They are cogs in the publish or perish machine and are there to enhance the PI’s productivity/program. The postdoctoral phase is even more prohibitively restricting. Hey, come do my research and be a glorified technician. There goes free inquiry out the window right there.

This shift has not come immediately from an ideological left. And the result is conservative homogeneity. Where are the new ideas/insights to come from? Not graduate students, not postdocs, and not profs. No funding unless the research has already been done and the results established for low-risk investment and only for those within the establishment. That’s actually fully conducive with conservatism. And that’s a problem. To the integrity of the enterprise itself.

I do not doubt the infestation of a radical left ideological hijacking of some fields. And such nonsense should be routed out & squashed, by good old fashioned scientific integrity and intellectual honesty. Not an agenda driven injection of yet *more* ideology. And one should recognize that there is widespread homogenization/strangulation/disciplization of the ‘intellectual’ culture of academia writ large, that has become excessively rigid and stifling to free inquiry. Not because of the left’s influence thereof, but in spite of it…

I point this out because there has been an empirical shift toward conservatism overall with respect to the *functioning* of science programs. And this stultification is really hard to explain by an increase of a liberal faculty & staff. There are widespread affects and negative impacts on the diversity of viewpoints that ought to be accounted for as part of an endemic, ongoing feature of the microenvironments of laboratories that are more concerned about getting grants, publishing, reputation, office space, and promotion in the machine above all. Gotta say, them liberals make quite the capitalists!

I am not going to argue that Krugman is an expert on this topic but, his greater point has some merit IMO. That is the conservatives are not necessarily getting more conservative but, that they are getting more detached from reality and that reality is more important that the liberal detachments. Myself, I do find them more and more provincial reactionaries.
This article does clear a misconception I had and that was the idea the liberals are static in their ideology. I did not see how that was possible given the rather extreme faddishness of micro-oppression-victimology that has unfolded in just the last few years. I think Krugman may be biased on this point.

However, the issue in Jon’s post is not on the relationship of the general disposition of the general population to science. It is on the problems resulting from an ideological monoculture on topics studied (and not studied) by social scientists.

Even if one takes the Pew results as “Holy Writ” (probably a bad idea), the ideological disproportion in the academy massively, vastly exceeds that of the general population. We have all addressed this elsewhere — it is most likely some (currently unknown) mix of self-selection**, hostile environment, and discrimination.

So, the major problem addressed by Jon’s post is NOT some societal one — he is not arguing that Republicans are “better” than Democrats. He has merely argued that what some of what passes for scholarship, teaching, and intellectual socialization in the academy is extremely narrow, and, most likely, distorted, biased and even erroneous, especially on politicized topics and topics into which political biases can creep (e.g., in my home field of social psychology, there is the so-called “power of the situation” — convenient for liberal ideologies for people to NOT be personally responsible for their behavior…).

Thus, regardless of who is “smarter” or “more” in touch with reality or science in the wider world, the almost complete lack of nonleftists in the academy, and especially in the social sciences and humanities, is seriously problematic.

** One delicious irony is that self-selection is often the “go-to” explanation for (liberal) faculty and liberal laypeople — an “explanation” they typically present without a shred of evidence. You can see evidence for this in the comments almost every time someone brings up the wild crazy ideological disproportion (y’all get why this is ironic, right? Liberals often also claim “we are the group that takes evidence seriously”). Which is true — until the data actually contest some cherished liberal value — then liberals look a lot like conservatives in their science denial (stereotype “inaccuracy” or The Blank Slate anyone?).

Whether conservatism became more “conservative” in this period or whether the definition of what is conservative changed is also a complicated question. For example, opposition to same-sex marriage used to be regarded as a moderate position. Now, it is widely regarded by many as a viewpoint on the right, or even the extreme right.

On academic perspective, Krugman has a logical argument, but I don’t think it is supported by an evidence. Not only has the faculty generally moved further to the left in self-identification, but it has moved further to the left on every indicator of political position. That in itself, though, is not the troubling part. Of greater concern is the fact that to a large extent the leftward movement is connected to a view widespread within universities that the very purpose of higher education is to promote a program of social and political change. This, I think, is the real source of the intolerance the author experienced at Sarah Lawrence. Anyone who disagrees with now conventional opinions in higher ed is not just seen as wrong, but as an enemy of the movement toward enlightened social justice.